Michael Tsai – Blog – T2 Macs Have a serious sound glitching error

The problem seems that this new chip has introduced glitches on a wide variety of external audio hardware from the entire audio industry, thanks to a bug in Apple's software. Problems with the way the new chip synchronizes the timing results in outcomes and errors in the audio stream. (It basically seems that all USB 2.0 audio interfaces are affected. This, of course, causes users to owe their interface manufacturer, but the error lies with Apple.)

Turning off "Automatically set the date and time" in System Preferences will reduce, but not solve the problem.

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To prepare: All T2-based Macs, which are all Mac models from the 2018 generation, are apparently useless with the USB 2.0 audio interface, regardless of the vendor. Sound interfaces using FireWire or Thunderbolt are apparently unaffected by this particular error, but USB 2.0 is currently the most popular audio device bus, so almost all new machine owners encounter the problem.

I'm curious to know if there were outbreaks on older models when bandwidth heavy devices were in use – were the internal cameras on older macs connected over USB? Is there anything you know you can try?

The problem is that USB was never a "real time" bus – usually the traffic on it can be kept to a minimum when you only have Built-in keyboard / mouse are the only consumers, and then the audio games will come way over most …

These reports are even more interesting because in days of very powerful phones and tablets, one of the few very good reasons to buy a complete laptop is computer processor-intensive work as pro audio.

Note: Turning off the "Set … automatically" does not eliminate the problem, because timeouts appear to sync even, even when it is off. There are probably other issues in the game as well. Solution-time completely resolved it for me, but not all.